Final Destination: Nowhere To Run
by Sputnik Writer
Summary: A bus full of kids, a premonition, eight lives are spared. But,  well, you know the rest. Death has been cheated, and he is not happy. And  there is nowhere to run, and nowhere to hide.  Now with Added Chapter 06!
1. 180 Miles To Go

It was a cold autumn morning; too cold to be stood outside waiting for the bus at ten to eight. Craig Raimi, seventeen years old and six foot two in his worn trainers shoved his hands deep into his pockets, stamped his feet and wished he were in back in bed. A tendon-stretching yawn distorted his long, dark face while a sharp breeze chilled every part of his exposed skin.

"Stop yawning you git, you're making me feel tired."

"Hmm?" Craig murmured.

"I said, _stop yawning_."

Craig forced his heavy eyelids open and looked across the bus shelter at the figure squeezed into the far corner, similarly hunched up against the chill.

"It's sending me to sleep," Nic Carpenter concluded, shifting a wad of chewing gum from one side of his mouth to the other.

"Fuck off," was the witty retort.

"Fuck off yourself," was the equally cutting reply.

A big petrol tanker sailed past the bus stop, its exhaust belching blue smoke and its engine snarling throatily in the crisp air. In its disturbed wake dead leaves and litter danced out of the gutter, swirling over Craig and Nic's feet. The both stared at the leaping detritus without much in the way of interest.

It was that kind of morning; a Monday morning with the weekend a vague, alcohol-soaked memory and a whole school week falling into place ahead of them with the inevitably of a demolished tower block.

"I can't _believe _you _sold_ my I.D. to a Polish milkman," Craig complained for the seventeenth time in six hours.

Nic looked affronted.

"I got fifteen quid for it," he protested.

"It _cost_ me thirty to get it from Dodgy Dave."

"Well I got that wrap of Charlie with it."

"That was ninety percent icing sugar, and you snorted the only bit that was real," Craig scoffed. "Every time I've sneezed since last night I feel like I've got half a pound of cake mix shoved up me nose."

"Yeah," Nic sighed. "That's the last time I buy coke from a bloke who says he sells to the 'Boro players."

Craig thought back to the previous night, and wondered how his friend could have been so comprehensively fooled by a cross-eyed Scotsman in a whisky-stained donkey jacket.

"Ah c'mon Nic, that bloke was as bent as a four-pound note."

"Well, I'd had a few."

"Oh that's why you tried to chat up that eighty-year old granny."

"She _looked _twenty-five."

"She _looked_ like she'd been dragged backwards through the ugly hedge." Craig pulled out a cigarette and lit it up, took one drag and coughed miserably. "Look at the picture I got of her." He pulled out his phone and proffered it to his mate. Nic scrolled through the picture gallery, stopped at the image in question and went grey with shock.

"Je-_sus_," he groaned in dismay.

"Not exactly a MILF, is she?"

"Not even a GILF," Nic agreed, squinting his bloodshot blue eyes to see if it made things any better.

"Well if you hadn't bought her all them drinks, _we_ wouldn't have been skint and _you_ wouldn't have sold my I.D."

"You were buying drinks for a girl all night," Nic protested feebly.

"Willow's my _girlfriend_, if I don't buy her drinks I don't get any sex."

"Nobody's that shallow, Craig. Besides which, you didn't get any sex last night 'cos she kicked you into a taxi with me"

"Yeah, she wasn't that impressed with the coke either."

"And you threw up over the back seat; I never thought I'd have to walk back from town _again_."

Craig took out his cigarette and spat on the ground. "Don't try and wriggle out of this. What I'm trying to say is that basically it was all your fault."

"Well," Nic said thoughtfully as their coach crested the ridge of the hill and began cruising noisily down towards them. "If you're pissed 'cos you didn't blow your load you'll have to take matters into your own hands."

"I'll sweet talk her round," Craig said confidently. He hoisted his bag up onto his shoulder and stepped out of the bus stop.

"You better, you're crap at picking up birds."

The bus was thirty yards away, and the shotgun sounds of its ancient brakes blasted loudly around the quiet village the pair called home. The coach shot past them in with a screech of burning rubber as its wheels locked up and it finally came to a smoky, panting halt ten yards beyond the two students.

Craig and Nic exchanged an amused glance and ambled down the pavement to meet it.

"How that rusty piece of shit ever passed its MOT I'll never know," Nic grumbled.

Craig reached the door and waited for it to open up. The driver reached down to pull a lever, but was rewarded with nothing more than a strangled hiss of a dying pneumatic system. He hauled his thirty stone frame from out behind his seat and instead opened the door with the manual handle.

"Morning Al," Craig muttered, tossing his cigarette aside. Nic merely grunted as the pair of them climbed aboard.

"Morning gentlemen," Al replied with a heartiness that was entirely inappropriate for this time of the day.

"I see your brakes are as good as ever."

"When you're school starts paying me a decent rate then I can get a better coach."

"You mean one that doesn't have seats that smell of piss?" Nic piped up.

Al's face set solid.

"Get in the back and sit down you little prick," he growled.

"Charming," Nic muttered under his breath, squeezing his way along the aisle as Al brutalized the door shut and forced his bulk back into his seat. The students were temporarily thrown off balance as the coach got under way again and an annoying little year nine kid pointed and laughed.

"What didja have to say that for?" Craig hissed to his friend as they reached the rear where all the Sixth Formers were gathered in a riot of non-uniform uniformity.

"I'm tired," Nic grouched. "Hungover, and I didn't do my Geography homework. I fail to see why I should be pleasant to a thirty stone lardarse with grey teeth. Oh hey guys."

"Hey Nic," intoned two voices in unison. Craig looked down at the two similarly dressed boys, eyes focussed on a pair of PSPs. The pop-punk shirts, ridiculously skinny jeans, hi-top shoes, the living embodiment of emo: Tony and Todd Slade.

"Morning lads," Craig offered half-heartedly to the twins, his focus somewhere else.

"Mmh," was the reply in stereo.

"Have fun mate," he said to Nic as his friend tossed his bag onto a free seat.

"You too," his friend replied, plugging the 'phones of his iPod into his ears. Before the sound was cut off, Craig heard a snatch of music.

"_Nowhere to run to, baby. Nowhere to hide…"_

He could see over the crowd of heads at mane of black hair at the very back and shuffled towards it, composing himself and mentally running through the upcoming conversation. "Sorry" seemed like a good word to start on; he could improvise from there.

Lost in thought he stumbled over a rucksack that had been dumped in the centre aisle with all the grace of spilled bag of shopping.

"Hey, watch it ya tosspot."

Another distraction. Craig glared at the over-muscled lunk who was sprawled across two seats, his feet propped up on the headrest in front.

"Stuff off, Hooper," he muttered.

In reply Jed Hooper kicked out at Craig's knee and presented him with one stubby middle finger.

"Swivel on it you long streak of horse piss."

Craig sighed, gathered up as much dignity as he could muster, and let the captain of the school's rugby team get back to his phone call with his trophy girlfriend on the other end.

One row of seats left.

He became aware of an animated conversation that appeared to be conducted entirely in internet acronyms. He personally, he couldn't read the damn thing on a screen, so it was a mystery to him how two people were able to communicate verbally in a language made up of letters and still know what the hell they were talking about.

Ellie Romero and Jillian King never gave him a second glance; they never had done. They had been in the same year since they were eleven, and Craig remembered that the sight of them in those pleated Catholic schoolgirl skirts had been the first sign that, yes, he definitely fell into the red-blooded hetero camp. Since then, up until he had met Willow, those two girls had sustained him in a series of bedroom ceiling fantasies that had eventually grown to involve him, them, a Penny Farting bicycle and a vat of strawberry jelly.

As it was the two perky, perma-tanned blondes once again completely failed to acknowledge his existence, and on his part he had long ago stopped caring.

Finally he could see onto the back seats. A slim, serious figure was curled up in the corner, reading through the inbox of her slim, serious phone. Her long black hair hung down over one side of her face, but couldn't hide the bags beneath her green eyes, which suggested that she too was suffering from a weekend of excess.

If she knew he was stood there watching her she made no sign of it, staring intently at her phone as if it were the only thing in the world. Willow Snyder, a seventeen-year-old raven-haired Oxbridge candidate and as far as Craig was concerned the most beautiful woman on the face of the Earth. She even snorted ersatz coke with a graceful precision that made him wonder if it was only him that got turned into a gibbering idiot if he so much as sniffed the Devil's dandruff.

_Right. Time for action._

"Hey, babe."

_Good start, Raimi. Smooth._

Willow gave no sign of hearing him as her slender fingers typed out another text message. Feeling uneasy he swung his bag from his shoulder and sat down next to her.

"So, about last night. I, er…"

Her eyes never left her phone. But Willow's knuckles grew white as her fingers tightened around the casing. Craig noticed that, and the flush of colour appear on her oval face.

"Sorry."

He heard a sharp intake of breath, and he knew that whatever was coming next was not going to be pleasant for him.

_I'm gonna kill you Nic._

Craig braced himself as the coach left the nexus of winding country roads and cruised onto the motorway, and his eyes slipped sideways to the roadsign. Some clever sod had - for whatever reason - spray-painted over two of the distance markers and left just one uncovered.

"What?" Willow snapped.

'BIRMINGHAM 180 MILES' it read.


	2. Premonition

Craig's brain was trying to distract him from the dismal matter at hand.

The coach jerked uncomfortably as Al wrestled his way through a gear change, and then settled back to a comfortable cruising speed of fifty miles per hour. Frost sparkled on straggly grazing pastures as they slid by into the boundless English countryside. A flock of birds beginning their long trip south for the winter kept pace with the bus for a second, then peeled away.

On the coach the younger kids resplendent in blazers and ties were chattering noisily. One particularly obnoxious one was throwing pencils at a bespectacled nerd sat two rows in front of him. Nearly all the rest were jabbering mindlessly in high-pitched tones, apart from the occasionally breaking voice as some of the kids who were going through puberty were seemingly strangled by their own vocal cords.

Further back the Sixth Formers were lost in little worlds of their own. Nic was bobbing his head along to the beat in his headphones, his floppy blond hair swaying and bouncing in time to the rhythm, setting up a neat counterpoint to the sway and shake of the coach.

* * *

><p><em>Somewhere deep in the mechanical guts of this ancient death trap a long-neglected bearing was reaching the explosive end of its life.<em>

* * *

><p>Across the aisle from him Tony and Todd were dead to the world, as oblivious to their surroundings and the passing scenery as if they had been place in an sensory deprivation chamber. Nonetheless, despite the fact they never shared a word one of they simultaneously paused their handheld games, reaching into their bags and pulled out a bottle of coke each. Drinking in unison, it was enough to cause a moment of disorientation that Craig's hungover brain gave up trying to process.<p>

* * *

><p><em>An abused piece of metal, starved of lubricant from a lifetime's work squealed and snarled, rattling and shaking as the pressures exerted upon it reached the point of no return.<em>

* * *

><p>A row behind them Jed was reassuring his trophy girlfriend that he would be taking her to the winter dance, scheduled to take place in a few weeks, and he was telling her that he'd already hired the limousine and the tux. As he droned away, his speech punctuated by "Innit" and "Y'know" he was playing idly with his captain's armband in his free hand, stretching it with his fingers into mindless abstract shapes. As the bus passed over a bump in the road it suddenly shot out from his grip and bounced off the seat in front. He struggled to move his massive frame and bent to retrieve it from the floor.<p>

* * *

><p><em>The bump in the road was all it took for the bearing to finally surrender and it flew apart into a myriad of rusty shards. Shrapnel lanced lethally through the vital inner workings of the coach, tearing and breaking as it blasted unstoppably through the confined space. Disaster was minutes away.<em>

* * *

><p>Ellie and Jillian wouldn't have stopped their thousand mile-an-hour conversation if God himself appeared in the sky. They never gave a glance to the petrol tanker that the coach had been trailing since back in the village. Obscured by their heads Craig noticed the logo on the tank of volatile fuel. 'DANIELS NORTHWEST'. Except all for one split second all he could see past the two girls' heads were the letters 'DIE NOW'.<p>

* * *

><p><em>Now a spinning gear was shredded by the flying debris. It continued rotating for a second, shedding pieces of razor sharp steel, causing further damage, before disintegrating with explosive force and severing the brake line with the efficiency of a knife.<em>

* * *

><p>Craig dragged his attention back to the girl in question. Willow had finally deigned to look at him, and that glare of contempt was like a punch to the guts. He opened his mouth to speak, aware that his throat was closing and drying up. He was sure that the first sound to pass his lips would be nothing more than a strangled squeak…<p>

* * *

><p><em>On the road ahead a shiny BMW pulled out blindly in front of the coach. Al pressed his foot down on the break pedal, and that was that. Nothing could stop what would happen next.<em>

* * *

><p>The initial impact, as the bus utterly failed to slow down and rear-ended the BMW felt like it was enough to loosen Craig's teeth. The BMW, impacted by fifty tons of unstoppable steel flew apart in an orgy of aluminium and rubber. One piece of its body, twisted into a fantastic piece of razor sharp debris flew straight through the gap where the coach's windscreen had been a second before. Al had a fraction of a second to react; not nearly enough time as it turned out as the lethal debris hit him side on in the face and decapitated him as neatly as you please. His corpse, seemingly unable to grasp what had happened to it spasmed wildly as Al's lifeblood fountained upwards in a thick gout of gore. His lifeless foot jerked and pressed down on the accelerator, forcing the coach through the wreckage of the Beemer and sending it barrelling out of control down a motorway packed with rush hour traffic.<p>

There was an avalanche of sound, screams of fear mingled with the apocalyptic noise of tearing metal, so loud that Craig thought his eardrums would burst. Instinctively he threw himself over Willow, who had barely time to react to the sudden immolation of destruction. Her breath was ragged in his ear, frantic and terrifying in its infectious fear.

He glanced out of the coach and saw a blue van that had been trying to overtake them be swatted aside contemptuously. The driver, trying to control his vehicle that now had two shredded tires, was unable to control an unstoppable fishtai. He swerved wildly, probably never noticed the car in front of him until it was too late, and was engulfed in a fireball as both vehicles exploded in a searing cloud of orange flame.

Nic had stood up, Craig couldn't begin to think why, and they had a millisecond of eye contact before a sharpened lance of jagged steel blasted out from the explosion pierced the side of the coach and speared his friend straight through the heart. It was going so fast that Nic was hurled bodily across the coach and straight out of the opposite window.

Craig was breathing hard, his eyes bugged open in shock and terror. His friend had just disappeared, gone in less time than it took to scream. But there was no time to mourn, this ballet of death was not over yet.

The coach was now structurally unsound, and burning ferociously where flaming petrol had splashed it. Craig saw Tony and Todd, yelling at the tops of their voices and clinging on to the seats in front of them for dear life. It didn't do them much good as the bus suddenly lost traction and turned horizontally across three lanes of speeding metal. If the coach had had a second more it might have avoided was coming next and maybe come to a harmless halt in the fields that the motorway cut through, but they didn't have a second, not by some distance.

A massive HGV smashed headlong into the front half of the coach, and the front two thirds of it were crushed like cardboard. One of the twins - Tony or Todd - was caught by the leg and dragged away as the coach was utterly pancaked. Craig had time to see him be crushed into a pulp as he was forced into a space that was barely an inch wide. He had never seen so much blood in his life, and his gag reflex began to kick in when the next phase of this disaster stopped him in his tracks.

The battered after third of the coach was dragged along by the roaring bulk of the HGV for a second and then tore itself free. With so much momentum left its wheels dug in and the battered cube of steel flipped, actually leaving the ground as it tumbled, shedding steel like rain.

The other twin - Todd or Tony - was flung bodily out of the gaping hole that had until moments ago been thirty feet of coach. His rag doll body sailed through the air. He might have died when he hit the ground, since he was going to impact solid tarmac at something like eighty or ninety miles an hour. However he was saved this fate when instead he was hit in mid-air by another HGV that had swerved to avoided the tumbling wreck and came roaring at him doing an even fifty.

He burst.

Jed had still been squeezed uncomfortably between seats trying to retrieve his armband when the accident had begun. He was still trapped there when the next impact of the wreckage against the road forced the section he was in into a rough cube shape. The captain of the rugby team was suddenly folded up into a box the size of a suitcase. He had a second to choke convulsively on the blood that flooded his throat before the coach came down with a final crunching impact and his head imploded like a dropped watermelon.

It seemed to Craig that a deathly silence had descended on the world, and he wondered for a second if he was indeed dead. But then the black fog cleared from his mind and he became aware of screaming. This was quickly followed by the screeching of brakes and the roaring of engines, and he realised he was still in mortal danger.

He blinked rapidly. He was sprawled against a seat at the back of the bus, directly above a fifteen foot drop onto a tangled mess of twisted, serrated steel. Willow was lying next to him, whimpering softly and clutching a wound on her forehead that was literally gushing blood.

"You okay?" he croaked.

She looked at him with eyes dulled by shock, a glazed stare that chilled him to the core.

"C'mon," he managed. "We've got to get out of here." As if to hammer this point home the sundered remains of the coach shook violently as something blasted past it. There was a squeal of brakes and then the thunder of crashing metal.

Directly above them was a gaping hole where the rear window had been. He struggled to pull his battered body through, pulling the stunned Willow up with him. He was nearly clear when the screaming finally pierced his brain and caught his attention.

A few feet below them Ellie and Jillian were hanging in their seats, held in place with seatbelts. There weren't doing anything _but_ screaming, shrill noises that were a symphony of anguish. He shouted their names, doubtful they could hear him, and tried again.

"Stay here," he said to Willow, before he clambered back into the torn interior. He really hoped that wasn't spilling petrol he could smell. Balanced precariously on the seats he leaned across and shout Jillian's name directly in her face. This seemed to snap her out of her hysteria and she stared at Craig with eyes rounded with terror.

"C'mon!" he cried, now sure of the stabbing tang of petrol that increased with every passing second. "Undo your seatbelt and climb outta here! We haven't got long!"

With shaking fingers Jillian fumbled open her seatbelt, and Craig pulled her out by one pale arm. For a moment he thought of all the times he would've had killed to lay hands on that soft, yielding flesh, but now was most definitely not that time. He was reaching across to Ellie. She was struggling frantically with her seatbelt when he was aware of yet another scream, this time from outside where Jillian had clambered out through the back window and had seen their doom. Convulsively, her hands released the frame and she dropped straight past Craig's disbelieving eyes and was decisively impaled on the upturned points of torn metal at the bottom end of the coach.

There was nothing he could have done. He stared at her mutilated body ten feet below, and only then became aware of the massive blare of the air horn that filled the world. His body pulsed with adrenaline and he clambered through the wreck and out of the rear window at a speed he would never have believed, pulling himself clear just in time to see the speeding fuel tanker with the blue lettering that spelt 'DANIEL NORTHWEST', now just seconds away from impact.

Willow had already managed to climb off the shattered remains of the coach. She too had seen the oncoming vision of death and was running to safety as fast as she could. Craig had no time to think, so his body did it for him and propelled itself into space a split second before 'DANIEL NORTHWEST' smashed into the wreckage with the unstoppable force of inevitability.

Ellie was still inside, but that never even crossed his mind as all thought was lost in the moment of flight.

There was a hot roar of flame that washed over his back as he hit the ground hard. He scrambled to his feet and ran towards Willow, who was torn between standing safe and helping her boyfriend. He was ten feet away from her when there was a second explosion as the tanker loaded with fuel erupted in a column of white flame.

Craig felt as if he had been smashed in the back, and fell hard against the ground. This saved his life, for a few seconds at least, as a sheet of metal flew out of the explosion and through the space that his body had occupied a moment before.

A sheet of metal which Willow at waist height and just didn't stop.

Her eyes were open in shock, fixed on his. He watched in disbelief as the life left them and his girlfriend slid apart, the two neatly bisected halves trailing lengths of entrails as they fell to the ground.

He didn't have grieve for long, however, as he suddenly became aware of a whistling sound high above him. He flipped onto his back, and saw a flaming meteor falling out of the sky. A block of metal, blown high out of the explosion, was now obeying the rules of gravity and coming back to earth.

Right where his head was.

He didn't even have time to scream, let alone move.

_THUD._


	3. And So It Came To Pass

"What?" Willow snapped. She waited impatiently for a second. "_What?_"

"_We have to get off this bus."_

"What?"

Craig was hyperventilating, his t-shirt soaked through with cold fear-sweat. A knot of terror gripped his heart and _twisted_.

_It had seemed so real!_ He could remember the jarring impact of the crash, the scent of the iron tang of blood, the heat of the fireball, the grief of watching his girlfriend brutally slain, that awful, endless blackness when he had _died!_ That was no dream. No dream could have had produced that depthless well that he had risen up and swallowed him whole.

Eyes wide, he whirled around. Nic was bouncing his head in time to some unknown beat, Tony and Todd grabbing their drinks in unison, Jed Hooper playing with his armband, Ellie and Jillian chattering in that earnest, animated, mindless way of theirs, and Willow, staring at him with a mixture of annoyance and the first inklings of curiosity.

This wasn't déjà vu, or a day dream, or a trick of the mind.

This, he knew with a certainty he had never felt before, was a warning, a vision.

A premonition.

With his body flooded with adrenaline he dashed down to the front of the coach, frantically stumbling over bags and legs, trying to resist the urge to vomit as his stomach lurched with every step. His heart was hammering and for a second he thought he was going to faint. He was desperate, frantic even, to get off this coach right _now_. Never in his life had he known an urgency like this.

He staggered to a halt and without thinking grabbed Al the driver by the shoulder and screamed with every fibre of his being:

"_**STOP THE FUCKING BUS!**_"

Al, naturally, jumped in surprise. But his surprise was soon replaced with anger.

"Sit down!" he ordered.

"No!" Craig cried. "No Al, you've got to stop the bus." He was on the verge of tears now.

"I won't tell you again!"

"Please, Al, stop the bloody bus. I… I can't explain right now just please believe you gotta…" Craig was babbling now, on the very cusp of hysteria where it slips over the cliff and becomes full blown insanity. As if to prove that was the case Craig attempted to lean over the driver and grab the steering wheel. This in turn caused Al to feel the first sparks of his own panic and he flailed wildly at the lunatic behind him who was apparently trying to crash the bus.

He was relieved a second later when Jed Hooper wrapped his arm around Craig's neck and hauled him back with a guttural roar. Craig kicked and screamed like a child throwing a tantrum, thrashing his arms and legs in an effort to free himself.

"What the fuck are you doing, Raimi?" Jed bawled, the tendons in his neck bulging.

"Stop the bus! Stop the bus!" Craig gibbered in reply.

"Right, that's it," Al snapped, anger quenching the fire of fear that was being stoked within him. He glanced in the wing mirror, flicked the indicator stalk, and pulled over onto the hard shoulder.

When Craig felt the bus slow down he felt a wave of relief surge through his body. An almost physical sensation, it warmed every part of him, and every muscle went limp. He suddenly felt exhausted, and he just wanted to sleep. Sleep for a thousand years.

This feeling of bliss didn't last long.

As he became aware of the rising shrill chatter of a bus full of school kids suddenly reach a new and feverish pitch Al grabbed him by the front of his jacket and hauled him bodily to his feet.

Craig was shocked; Al may have looked like a literal mountain of lard, but beneath all that sweating fat were muscles that could break his neck like a twig.

"I've had enough of you little bastards!" Al roared, his face red with fury. "All I get off you overprivileged shits is moaning and you being gobby pricks! Well I don't have to take it any more. You want me to stop? Well I've stopped! Now get of my fucking bus before I break you in half!"

Al was surprised when Craig didn't so much as complain or protest, instead pushing right past him without so much as a second glance or word.

Craig bounded into the stairwell and began attacking the door handle, yanking at it with the intensity of madness. When the door finally swung open with a protesting, prolonged creak he fell out onto the hard shoulder, sprawling across the tarmac and panting heavily.

Still riding on the crest of his anger Al turned to the back of the bus.

"That goes for the rest of you Sixth Formers!" he bellowed, with not a care beyond satisfying his rage. Jed began to protest, and six heads at the back perked up as they became aware they were being addressed by a furious voice.

"Al, what are you on about?" Jed managed, his own anger rapidly subsiding.

"I mean it. I've been taking shit off's people like you for twenty fucking years and I have had enough! All of you, now get off! _Now!_"

Protesting and complaining every inch of the way the seven remaining sixth formers trooped off the bus and down onto the hard shoulder. Other than Jed, none of them really had any idea what had just happened, and were furiously berating their red-faced driver, who was stood in the stairwell glaring at the eight teenagers stood by the side of the motorway. The younger kids had all come over to one side of the bus, and had their faces pressed against the windows, laughing and pointing; Nic responded by flicking them the v.

"How're we supposed to get to school?" Jillian complained.

"I don't give a fuck," Al snarled. "Just fuck off." With that he yanked the door shut and stomped back to his seat. As he started the engine, and signalled that he was about to turn back onto the motorway Craig, who was sat on the tarmac willing his hammering heart to slow down before it burst, was struck by a terrible thought and leapt to his feet.

He leapt at the door and began pounding frantically on the glass. His own personal fears were quelled, but he _knew_ what was about to happen. He had to stop that bus.

"Al, no!"

"What are you doing Craig!" Willow yelled, fury bleeding into her words in a way that Craig had never heard before in their year and a half together. He ignored her; he had more immediate things to worry about

"Al!" he screamed. "You have to stop or you're all going to die!"

That, for one second, gave pause to the little group of people by the side of the road. The words, of course, were the ravings of a madman; but the tone, the conviction were so total that for a brief moment they could almost believe it. Craig by now was hammering so hard that bruises sprouted on the palms of his hands but Al was having none of it. Without so much as a second glance at the hysterical teen - who was apparently trying to break into the very bus he had been frantically trying to get off a moment ago - he spotted a gap in the traffic and pulled out.

Nic could finally take no more. Convinced his friend of twelve years had taken leave of his senses and was about to run after the coach into three lanes of speeding traffic he grabbed him around the waist and wrestled him back.

"What are you talking about?" he asked patiently.

"I saw it!" Craig gasped, now weeping freely. "I saw the crash." He turned around and looked his best friend in the eye. "I saw us all _die!_"

Willow now stepped forward, and in a no nonsense manner pulled her boyfriend away from Nic, looked him straight in the face and pressed her forehead to his. The cold sweat that lay there sent a shock through her body.

"Calm down, baby," she murmured finally. Behind her she heard Jed sneering in contempt.

This seemed to do the trick, and for a second Craig really felt as if it had been all a dream after all. He could really believe the whole thing had been a figment of an over-active imagination, and he was ready to believe right up until the moment the first screech of crashing steel reached them from two hundred yards up the road. Eight heads whipped around in unison to see their coach suddenly veer sideways across the motorway, be nailed solidly by a speeding HGV, and fly apart.

Other cars were skidding and flipping as the three lanes of traffic became an apocalyptic circus of death, punctuated by fireballs rising into the crisp autumn sky. The into this circus came a petrol tanker, as unstoppable as a missile. All eyes were now on Craig, but he only had eyes for two words:

'DANIELS NORTHWEST'.

It didn't miss.


	4. Eight Ways Of Coping

The emergency services were commendably quick.

Within five minutes or so the first police cars had turned up, quickly followed by the fire service and ambulances, but for most of the victims of this morning's pileup it was much too late. In fact, even if there had been a whole emergency response unit on the scene at the time of the accident there was little they could have done to save lives once the metal had finally stopped flying, so complete was the carnage. They were doing their best though; picking up the pieces, so to speak.

There were a lot of pieces. Some of them might once have been human.

One police car had stopped on the hard shoulder next to the group of eight shell-shocked kids. The officer inside assumed at first that the kids were a bunch of morbid gawkers from the village down the road, but that theory had gone out of the window when he had seen the expressions on their faces as he was suddenly presented with eight variations on the theme of 'shock and horror'.

Craig had passed beyond hysteria and was now trapped in the calm pools of shock. Having nearly burnt himself out emotionally during those first frantic minutes following the premonition his mind and body were unable to cope with the overwhelming sight of it coming to pass. So now he was sat alone on the kerb, head in hands, thoughts drifting slowly and meaninglessly as he struggled to process the new reality he found himself in.

So he could see the future.

Bizarrely, Nic's own thoughts were running along a similar path; namely why couldn't his friend's talent for premonition hadn't run to something more useful, like predicting the lottery or telling him beforehand that Samantha Bailey was going to knee him in the groin when he asked her out? Intellectually he realised that this bizarre train of thought was probably due to shock, but he couldn't stop himself, and maybe that was a good thing. After all, the alternative was that he had avoided being in a fatal coach crash by a matter of seconds only because his friend had received a miraculous vision without which he would now be a cooling piece of meat on the motorway.

Tony and Todd were coolly, dispassionately filming the scene with their twin iPhones. Probably if they were able to react they would be shivering nervous wrecks by now, but they hadn't even made a conscious decision to take out their phones. In truth they rarely made conscious decisions, instead following set patterns that had been established long ago and set ways of thinking that even an explosive multi-car pileup couldn't derail.

In the normal course of things their grief would come, but Tony and Todd dealt with things their own way, however unnatural it would seem to outsiders. So they filmed, and shared the footage with a ravenous world that ate up every second they put online.

Jed was dealing in his usual manner by getting angry. He paced up and down ten yards of hard shoulder, red in the face and cursing under his breath. Feeling lost, confused and very much out his comfort zone he was trying like the rest to keep a grip on his sanity. He was mostly failing, which made him even angrier, and trapped him in a vicious cycle. He had a desperate urge to lash out, at something, _anything_, but instead all he could feel was a fuming sense of impotence. As he paced his fists clenched and unclenched involuntarily, and his teeth ground with barely suppressed rage.

Jillian and Ellie were the first to have succumbed to full-on near death hysteria, and they had dived headfirst into the nightmare pit of wailing grief. Clutching each other like two shipwrecked survivors they cried and moaned, going headlong down the old fashioned biblical route of the wailing and gnashing of teeth. Expensive make-up ran in rivers, and even more expensive hairdos disintegrated in the overwhelming stress of the moment. In wasn't exactly dignified, but then nothing this Godawful morning had been. It was only natural really.

Willow Snyder wasn't doing this. Her extremely well-educated brain was working overtime to come to a rational explanation for what had happened in the last half an hour, and she wasn't happy that it was failing miserably.

All her life she had sought the logical, the sensible, the rational. She didn't believe in ghosts, or UFOs, or God or fucking monsters hiding under your bed, and she certainly didn't believe that the human mind was somehow able to discern the path of the future. But, that was what had apparently just happened, and her mind was nearly in meltdown at the prospect of all that she held to be true being shattered forever. There was no logical explanation for any of this, and the crisis of faith she was currently undergoing was just as strong as that of any lapsed Catholic had ever felt.

For the first time in her life she felt herself adrift, with no compass and certainly nothing approaching a map, and that absolutely fucking terrified her.

Eight people, each wrapped up in their own worlds and as oblivious to the policeman trying to get their attention as the corpses that littered the road. Eight people with a shared connection that now ran much deeper than ever before; a connection that none of them could guess at.

A connection that would hold them together until death.

And the clock was ticking…


	5. Hitting Home

Rain thundered down from the sky and battered the window. Howling wind shook the glass as if some huge powerful animal was trying to force its way in. Cold draughts whistled in through the gaps around the edges where the ancient sealant had dried and crumbled.

Craig lay on his bed, arms folded behind his head, eyes fixed unseeing on the damp plaster ceiling, his mind drifting around the house, picking up the little signs of life that made this place a home.

Downstairs he could hear the muffled chatter of the TV as his parents watched their nightly soaps, the dialogue reduced to incoherent mumbling. The smell of bubbling stew floated from the kitchen, rich and homely, teasing his nostrils but not his stomach which refused to be hungry.

On the other side of the room an antiquated radiator rattled and groaned, setting up a neat counterpoint to the roaring storm outside. Wooden beams creaked as the vile weather caused them to expand and contract. The whole place was filled with a symphony of sounds and smells that tripped switches in Craig's brain that would be forever associated with the place where he had spent all his life. It may have been cold, and draughty, and falling apart at the seams, but he had lived here for seventeen years; every inch of his vertical growth had taken place inside these four walls. He had always felt safe here. Always.

Until today.

He was half listening to the melodic murmuring coming from downstairs but instead of the warm, physically comforting sensation he usually felt by knowing his parents were nearby in times of strife all he could feel was a cold dread clutching at his heart like skeletal fingers. It was fundamentally disturbing on every level; this feeling of being in danger in his own home, and it was shaking him to the core. It could be after the horror of this morning that he would be justified in never feeling safe again, that this chill grip on his soul was just the natural feeling that death was always much closer than you thought.

His mum had often told him that when you were seventeen then you felt you were going to live forever, and it was only as you got older that you became more and more aware how laughably naïve that notion was. Every breath you took was just one more tick of the clock, one more second falling into the blank depths of history, but until you came to that realisation and confronted your mortality then you were unencumbered by any notion that your time was inexorably running out.

But it wasn't that. At least, he didn't think so. Then again, how could he be sure? He had come within minutes of death, and even now would be a cold slab of meat by the side of the motorway if not for… what?

That was the million dollar question, right there. He had experienced a genuine, for-real miracle in that premonition, and that ran square in the face of everything seventeen years of life had taught him. He was torn, torn between knowing that death was the one thing shared by every man, woman and child and feeling utterly invincible. Yes, the newly imparted knowledge had been horrific in both force and delivery, but _he had cheated death!_ How could he _not_ feel invulnerable? He had been given a gift, a second chance at a life that would have ended this very morning if not for something not of this world.

So why didn't he feel like he had received a miraculous reprieve? Why did this feel like the calm before the storm?

Senses long neglected were stirring into electric, crackling life. With every moment that had passed since the events of this morning Craig had been unable to shake the feeling that he had been followed. It had started when the police trauma counsellor had turned up, and had grown through the day as his parents came to collect him from the hospital, the quiet drive home, right up to the weeping and fussing that he had felt too shocked to reject with a tantrum of teenage embarrassment. All through this long day he had become ever more certain that there was _something_, well, following him.

It had taken a while to filter in through the disjointed fog that wrapped his mind, and he was not really sure whether or not it was the product of an imagination rattled by a day of horror. Lying in bed, thoughts stuck on an uncontrollable rollercoaster of furious chaos, he wasn't sure of anything anymore, and so was tempted to brush the cold presence off and sink further into the numbing well of shock.

At which point, with impeccable timing, the power cut off.

It took a second or two to sink into his abused brain as Craig continued to stare at the ceiling now lit only by a biblical flash of lightning. A roll of thunder shook the ancient timbers of the house and the skeletal branches of the twisted tree in the garden scraped frantically at the window.

Mortally afraid, but having no idea why, he sat bolt upright on his bed with a wail of fear, chest heaving as great jagged breaths barked from his lungs. Sweat needled from his skin across his whole body, and then everything hit him in one massive sucker-punch to the gut and hot floods of tears sprang from his eyes. Sobbing wracked his body in great shuddering paroxysms of grief, loud enough to be heard above the cacophony of the storm.

Presently his parents came up the stairs, bearing an emergency candle each and both wearing expressions of wrenching sadness as they saw their only son be swallowed by the terror and trauma of the past twelve hours. They held him and told him they loved him, their own souls hurting at the deep pain that came radiating from Craig's slender body.

It took a long time for the crying to subside to sleepy murmurs, and when they quietly slipped out of the room, leaving the door open a fraction, Sian Raimi began weeping herself, misery overwhelming her defences. Malcolm Raimi held his wife tight, and she felt his warmth comfort her in the darkest hour their family had faced. That night, as they held each other close against the fury of the storm, Malcolm made love to his wife, bringing each other the primal relief which had sustained all humanity through the worst of times.


	6. Riders On The Storm

Nic Carpenter stared at the glow of his laptop monitor, eyes tired and raw from several hours spent online. His fingertips rested lightly on the keyboard as the computer completed another search, presenting another series of blue links. Nic sat motionless for several seconds as his mind struggled to link together all the tenuous threads he had found so far.

It was getting on for three in the morning, and there was a dull ache forming behind his eyes and at the forefront of his brain, but he was following the brief glimpses of something, some bigger picture which lay tantalizingly out of reach. He had been sat here for six hours, downing endless cans of coke, searching, searching. What he was searching for he wasn't sure; only that he knew it was there, and that he would know it when he found it.

He blinked several times and rubbed his strained eyes with the hands, willing them open. His computer buzzed for several seconds and he shivered involuntarily, stifling a yawn as he did so. It was cold in his bedroom, and the storm outside wasn't helping matters.

But then again, he could never remember being this cold. Sure, here, high up the side of the valley it could get pretty nippy during the winter, but the coming snow and ice were a few months away. He put it down to tiredness, but he couldn't sleep until he got some answers to a question he didn't know yet.

It was like a maddening itch behind his eyes, and he urged to scratch it, but he was as helpless as a man with no arms. In desperation he was staring at the screen, hoping for a blinding flash of light like St. Paul on the road to Damascus.

Currently he was looking at a blog of some lunatic conspiracy theorist, who was screaming at whoever would listen that the US government had advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks. The tone was inflammatory, the conviction tangible, the evidence… mostly imaginary. It was a good read, even if it was the ravings of a certified loony, but it wasn't was Nic was after, although he read it all the way through in the hope of sating that infuriating itch.

No such luck.

With a groan of frustration he pushed his chair back from his desk, stood up sharply and began pacing his darkened bedroom. What he needed, he decided, was a drink. Muttering slightly under his breath as he tried to focus his mind and try to find something_ - anything - _from all the information he had absorbed tonight.

Opening his wardrobe he rummaged through a pile of discarded clothes and retrieved his hidden bottle of vodka. Unscrewing the top he took a good straight slug, and then poured a measure into a tumbler. After placing the bottle next to his laptop he took a sip as he sat back down at his desk and tried to _think_.

Typing 'premonition' into Google had gotten him millions upon millions of results, and similar words like 'prophecy' and 'visions' had just returned 2012 doomsday sites and various charlatans out to make a quick buck from the desperate and the gullible. The only coherent message had been a warning, whether of disaster or whatever, but the underlying theme had been purely capitalist in intent.

But there had been little flashes here and there which had compelled him to keep going. Stuff like some guy who had missed a flight from Boston or somewhere that had subsequently ploughed into a field on takeoff. There had always been stories like that, and now scattered across the internet they were providing tantalising clues for Nic to explain the feeling that something was wrong not just with him, but with the entire world.

Whatever had happened this morning - and Nic was struggling to take this at face value, although the evidence suggested little else - Craig had claimed to have known about the bus crash and had saved eight lives by getting them off that coach. Discounting the idea that he had caused the accident, there was no way he could have known what was about to happen; the crash had come out of nowhere. Yes, the coach had been knackered, and he himself had joked about it crashing and killing them all on more than one occasion, but to be so specific about it gave Craig not just the ability to make a good guess, but the ability of precogniscience to a degree that was far beyond the rational.

Sitting there with unfocused eyes and the storm reaching new heights of fury outside he slowly brought his fingers to the keyboard, waiting for a spark of inspiration. There was a biblical explosion of lightning outside which filled the darkened room, and with a literal flash of insight the number '180' appeared at the forefront of his mind.

He remembered when the coach had come down the slip road, and past the vandalised motorway sign, how the single line 'BIRMINGHAM 180 MILES' had stood out simply because it had been mysteriously left alone. At the time he had noticed it and with a single internal shrug promptly forgotten it, going back to his music and the miserable thought of another school week to slog through. Now, given he was already clutching at straws and he had nothing better to go on, he typed 'premonitions 180' into the waiting box and clicked 'SEARCH'.

_What the hell is Flight 180?_ he thought as he clicked open the first link. _Oh, right._

Volée Airlines Flight 180 had taken off from JFK back in 2000 and had exploded a few minutes later; this much was well known. The blog he was now reading contended the story had not ended there, and had supplied a bunch of links to newspaper and TV sites with snippets of stories about a bunch of survivors who had gotten off the plane minutes before it's final departure.

_What's that got to do with anything?_

Further digging revealed an answer that sent a chill down his spine.

The results were vague on details but demonstrated enough to Nic to show him that what had happened this morning _had happened before_. Something called the North Bay Bridge in New York state, Flight 180, a massive motorway pile-up, a disaster on the morbidly appropriate Devil's Flight rollercoaster, and last year's accident at the McKinley Speedway, which he now vaguely recalled reading about at the time. Whilst the disasters themselves were well known, what hadn't been spread widely beyond the underground rumour-mill of the internet was that in each case one lucky bastard had had a premonition and had saved themselves and the lives of a small number of others. But in each case, Nic discovered with a start, it hadn't ended there.

His eyes widening in fear, he followed the trail of broken, burnt, torn and crushed corpses that lay in the wake of these disasters. The half-drunk glass of vodka lay ignored as the litany of dead survivors continued seemingly without end. At one point, reading of some poor bastard who'd had his guts sucked out of his arse he felt burning vomit rise up his gullet, and coughed hurriedly to suppress it before he was sick.

He was inclined to dismiss it all at first as urban legends, but the more he read, and the more he was linked to real life archived material of people being sliced and immolated and - _Jesus!_ - impaled by a falling fire escape, the deeper the cold feeling in the pit of his stomach grew. If this was all some sort of coincidence, then it ranked alongside the proverbial roomful of monkeys being able to type out Shakespeare. In other words: impossibly long odds, on a par with winning the lottery every week for a century or something.

So, this was it: in every example where lives had been saved by a premonition, none of those survivors had lived beyond a year of the initial accident. He felt his blood turn to ice as the implications of this sunk in, and his body became clammy with fear sweat.

_I've gotta tell someone_. If all this was true - and he was more and more inclined to believe it was - then the lucky few who had escaped death by mere moments were all in mortal danger. He was decided whether to use his phone or send a warning via Facebook when there was an almighty explosion just outside his window, a blinding flash that knocked him out of his seat clutching his abused eyes and a deafening crash as a burning tree smashed through the ceiling about a foot from where he had been sat.

A bolt of lightning had struck the ancient oak that dominated the Carpenter's back garden, toppling it into Nic's bedroom and cutting off all routes of escape. Lying on the carpet, feeling the heat scorching his skin and crisping the hairs on his arms and head, Nic looked with streaming eyes at the flame-wreathed trunk that lay between him and the door, terror filling his veins as he saw the fire consuming his furniture like a ravenous animal. The bottle of vodka on his desk exploded, sending burning alcohol across the room in a bloom of liquid flame and further fuelling the conflagration.

Looking around frantically, scorched lungs fighting to breathe against the suffocating smoke, he shuffled away from the burning oak, feeling the freezing wind blasting into his room now unnaturally exposed to the elements.

An idea sparked in his mind as he looked up through the ragged gap where his roof had been. A joist of archaic wood hung down, miraculously free from flames. He scrambled to his feet, little eddies of fire snaking across the carpet towards his bare feet almost as if they had a will of their own. With no thought other than for that of his own safety he grasped the sturdy timber in both hands and began laboriously pulling himself up, inch after agonising inch.

Hot, greedy flames swirled around, and he could feel his skin tightening painfully in response. With streaming eyes, bare palms and feet being torn and bruised on the splintering wood he hauled himself out of the cauldron of fire and out into the tempest beyond.

Instantly as he emerged from the broken tiles he was battered by the ferocious, freezing gales which howled along the dark valley, and for one heart-stopping second he nearly lost his grip as death snatched hungrily at his heels. With a supreme burst of effort Nic pulled himself onto the roof, scrabbling across shining wet tiles away from the boiling inferno that was now his room.

He reached the chimney, the point furthest away from the gaping rent in the roof through which smoke and sparks now billowed ungovernably. He was temporarily safe here, but he was trapped. Hauling himself upright he now peered into the storm and opened his mouth to scream for help.

A second bolt of lightning screamed down from the tormented sky and struck the chimney, Amidst a fountain of white sparks, Nic's vision was obliterated by a wall of blinding light, in the centre of which, he was sure, was a black figure, reaching out with the finality of death.

The force of the strike blew his body limply backwards, sending him tumbling unstoppably, helplessly straight through the twisted hole in the roof and back into the searing charnel-house of his room.

There was a final bloom of fire as he was consumed utterly, whilst around his house the storm howled with a sound very much like a scream of triumph.


End file.
